The Mellotron was an electro-mechanical sampling keyboard, using individual 8-second tape strips for each key. Due to advances in digital sampling tech, and the machines' notoriety for breaking down, they aren't used very often nowadays. Nevertheless, the Mellotron was featured on Siamese Dream's "Luna" (a white Mellotron can be seen briefly in Vieuphoria), and was brought back out to work on the song "Oceania" on 2011/07/03, as mentioned by Billy on twitter.
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